Populists Are Trying to Save Democracy
Taking a Stand Against Creeping Regime Change
It’s the End of Our Democracy as we know it,
And I feel fine.
Welp, it’s official.
2024 and 2025 are shaping up to be some of the most pivotal election years of the 21st century, and in case you haven’t heard, Democracy is on the ballot. Major recent and upcoming elections include:
El Salvador in February 2024
Portugal in March 2024
The Netherlands sorted out their next coalition in May 2024
EU Parliament in June 2024
Austria in September 2024
The US in November 2024
The UK by January 2025
Ireland by March 2025
Germany by October 2025
Canada by October 2025
In all of those elections, populist candidates and parties are expected to win (or have already won) pluralities and majorities; a fact leading to endless garment-rending amongst the Laptop Class, who see populists winning elections as democratic backsliding (in a way that imprisoning opposition candidates apparently is not). It is more or less taken as an article of faith in elite circles that populism rearing its head in politics is a terrible-horrible-no-good-very-bad thing.
To briefly steelman the argument against populism, it’s often criticized as a political ethos of short-term gain for long-term pain. Populists are seen by their detractors as promoting superficially popular but ultimately self-destructive policies for the sake of temporarily ginning up enough political support to permanently consolidate power. In this view, populist politicians are like (fictional) Commodus selling off grain reserves to throw a giant party.
Of course, populists being characterized as shortsighted panderers is by and large a case of the Iron Law of Woke Projection; populists hardly have a monopoly on shortsighted and unaffordable political stunts, and many populists explicitly run on a platform of governing like grownups.
The closest contemporary analogy to Commodus selling off the grain reserves would be Biden liquidating the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to boost his faltering poll numbers.
The rise of populists using slogans like “Canada is Broken” is, let’s face it, a direct downstream consequence of mainstream political parties governing downright irresponsibly.
CIA analyst turned author Martin Gurri over at The Free Press summed up the incipient global conflict over populism nicely:
“A fierce political conflict is raging over much of the democratic world. On one side we find the normies: ordinary people who defend, naively, the historic principles of democracy such as freedom of speech and assembly, the separation of powers, etc. On the other side stand the elites, masters of the great institutions of wealth, knowledge, and power, who insist that extraordinary measures must be taken to save a depraved and self-destructive society from its own history and its own people—that is to say, from the normies.
The elites are driven entirely by the impulse to control. They detest democracy, which keeps getting in their way, and much prefer a golden ideal they possessively call “Our Democracy”—their own rule in perpetuity. Individual rights are unfortunate legacies from a simpler era. The First Amendment, for example, they see as “hamstringing the government in significant ways.” By the way, that was Ketanji Brown Jackson talking, a Supreme Court justice whose job it is to defend the Constitution. Freedom of speech does hamstring government, that’s perfectly true—but only to the elites (who hate the sound of normie voices) is it a bad thing.
What is the conflict about?
The normies want to get on with life. They want to work, get married, have children—boring stuff. That’s what normal means.
The elites, for their part, wish to change everything: sex, the climate, our history, your automobile, your diet, even the straws with which you slurp your smoothie.”
“The nature of the global conflict is interpreted very differently by the normies and the elites. The normies believe that digital platforms have brought them into close proximity to the people at the top of the pyramid. They can criticize—loudly and rudely—presidents, journalists, and experts of every kind as equals in the information sphere. They can talk back. Increasingly, they have risen in revolt against these elites and their institutions, which they find self-serving and inept.”
“The elites disagree. They find it far-fetched to think that the public is growing feistier or more independent: the exact opposite is the case. The normies are viewed by the elites as a “basket of deplorables,” a dull and almost animalistic mass of cravings that are easily manipulated by clever but unscrupulous populists. Fake news on social media hypnotizes the online multitudes and leads them to perdition. How else to explain their surly attitude toward their betters? What other reason could there be for the millions who voted for Trump?”
As I’ve written previously, the normies-elites divide has a strong class-based underpinning, with the Laptop Class viewing the Physical Class with paranoid contempt.
Destroying Democracy to Save Democracy
In the aftermath of Trump’s conviction, his fundraising hauled in a $53 million windfall almost instantly. He will also remain on the ballot despite ludicrous efforts to have him purged from it, and he seems to have remained slightly ahead in the polls. None of the Democrats’ attempts to circumvent the will of the people seem to be paying off so far.
The paranoid contempt elites feel towards those pesky uppity voters has led directly to lawfare-based attempts to “cut the head off the snake”, and suppress populist uprisings by taking out politicians who are seen as too responsive to, or understanding of, pervasive anger in democratic societies.
Of course, none of this will work in the way that political elites want it to, as Matt Taibbi explained well:
The New York indictment was a bespoke prosecution designed specifically for Trump…even MSNBC called this legal theory of District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s “eyebrow-raising” and “novel,” which should tell you a lot.
Hillary Clinton got mere fines for a far more serious records offense in an almost exactly similar context: calling the funding of the infamous Steele dossier “legal and compliance consulting.” That’s hiding a role in an electorally significant public fraud, and though I’m not sure that offense warranted jail, it’s certain Trump’s “crime” didn’t, if Hillary’s doesn’t even go to court.
What do these people imagine will happen now? Where do they believe Trump voters will go? Do they think the anger that drove his campaign in the first place will evaporate? Do they realize Trump surged ahead in all the battleground states during this trial? Don’t they see where this is headed?
No. Washington pols always see elections through a rearview mirror, imagining candidates create supporters, not vice versa. It comes from the belief that voters are sheep and have no beliefs beyond what their political betters instruct them to feel. Therefore, one controls them by controlling leaders. But Gene McCarthy didn’t surge in 1968 by convincing people to oppose the Vietnam war. Voters were there. Buchanan and Perot didn’t inspire bitterness about the loss of manufacturing jobs, the unemployed did, and Bernie Sanders in 2016 didn’t invent post-bailout blue frustration. Voters lead the way. Politicians arrive to take advantage. It’s always how it works.
As The Free Press has reported, the case against Trump wasn’t just based on “eyebrow-raising” legal theories, it also relied almost entirely on the testimony of proven habitual liar Michael Cohen:
“Robert Costello, one of the lawyers who worked closely with Cohen at the U.S. Attorney’s Office at the Southern District of New York, testified before the House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday that his old office declined to prosecute the hush money case against Trump because Cohen was “totally unworthy of belief.”
Cohen is Bragg’s star witness. And according to Costello, Cohen told the U.S. attorney’s office in 2018 that the “payment to Daniels was his own idea, designed to try and get him back into the inner circle of Trump people in Washington.”
That is damning testimony from a far more credible source than Cohen, who pleaded guilty in 2018 to lying to Congress and served two and a half years in prison.”
“There is no chance the conviction will withstand appeal, particularly given that it relies so heavily on Cohen’s testimony.”
“Costello [in Congressional testimony] summed up the dangers of Bragg’s folly. “In the Trump case, they are seeking a conviction by any means necessary,” he said. “They do not care if it is overturned on appeal because that will likely not happen until after the election. In the meantime, they will have effectively interfered with the 2024 presidential election and perhaps influenced some voters because of an ill-gotten conviction.”
In other words, Alvin Bragg is destroying our democratic system in order to save it.”
The Biden White House, in their increasing desperation to avoid a 2024 shellacking, has tried to maintain a façade of distance from Trump’s legal foibles even as they consistently coordinate behind the scenes with his pursuers. As Christian Parenti noted in Compact:
“I have been shocked by the number of liberal and left-wing people who think the cases against Trump are in no way politically motivated—and, in at least one case, coordinated…members of a DOJ team met with Biden administration staffers ahead of the raid on Mar-a-Lago over Trump’s classified-documents case, as White House visitor logs show.
Nor do most on the left know the details of Hunter Biden’s $83,000-a-month gig for Burisma, the shady Ukrainian energy firm, which he held even as his father, then the vice president and the Obama administration’s point man on Ukraine, pressured the government in Kiev to fire a prosecutor who was going after Burisma for corruption. Joe Biden later bragged on video about getting that prosecutor fired.
Similarly, most liberals and leftists I speak with have learned to memory-hole the suppression of the New York Post’s exposé on the Hunter Biden laptop, which included evidence of Hunter arranging a meeting between Burisma executives and his father (who, again, was the Obama point man on Ukraine at the time).
And so those who are mired in Trump Derangement genuinely can’t see what so many others do see: an outrageous double standard that overlooks Biden family corruption while leaving no charge unpursued against Trump. Those who don’t see the double standard also have no idea how infuriating it is for many people who do see it. It is so blatantly unjust that it is likely helping Trump gain unprecedented levels of support among groups of historically stalwart Democratic voters like union members, African-American men, Latinos, and young people.
Michael Shellenberger warns of the long-term fallout:
“The abuse of the court system by Democrats in an effort to incarcerate Trump and keep him off the ballot is far more of a violation of norms than anything Trump ever dreamed of.”
“The recent felony conviction of Trump for falsifying business records relies on the idea that he misclassified campaign payments…Hillary Clinton was found to have mislabeled payments related to the Steele dossier during her 2016 campaign, and she was never prosecuted. The Federal Election Commission (FEC) merely fined Clinton and the Democratic National Convention (DNC) for this misconduct.
In fact, everything about New York District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s recent conviction of Trump is abnormal. For starters, Bragg campaigned on the promise to prosecute Trump. He turned the misdemeanor of falsifying business records into a felony by tying it to election interference. The case was so weak that both the Department of Justice and the former DA refused to prosecute it.
The judge in the case donated to Biden and his daughter is the president of a Democratic Party fundraising firm whose clients include Rep. Adam Schiff, who led the Russiagate hoax. The judge told the jurors that they didn’t need to agree on what crime Trump intended to commit by falsifying records.”
“There is danger all around us. If Biden wins the election, then it will be proof that Democrats can weaponize government and the justice system against their enemies and get away with it. If Trump is elected, there is the risk that he will seek revenge and weaponize the system against his enemies. Already, there are Trump supporters calling for just that.”
Sam Harris shares similar concerns:
My concern now is that if Trump loses in November, we will once again find ourselves in a country where half the population feels that a presidential election has been rigged—this time by an unfair prosecution and a spurious conviction.
This is a social experiment that we shouldn’t have been so eager to run.
These sorts of lawfare tactics are not exclusive to the United States. Germany has attempted to ban one of its most popular political parties, and populist meetings in Europe are being openly suppressed. Nigel Farage of Brexit fame was recently debanked over his politics (Canadians can relate). With the peasantry getting more and more pissed off at the status quo every year, any politician who bucks the “let them eat cake” party line must be neutralized.
Lawfare isn’t exclusively targeting politicians either. Laptop Class elites loathe Elon Musk for what he’s done to Twitter/X, as he has forced out all the elitist censors and installed a far more democratic system of fact-checking via his Community Notes feature, the results of which are both factually superior to the old regime and frequently more hilarious. No good deed goes unpunished; Musk has similarly found himself the target of lawfare attacks.
One can sense a creeping postmodernism in how mainstream political parties view their own unpopularity; it couldn’t possibly be that their performance has been objectively subpar, and that the citizenry resents having virtue-signal policies like open borders and net zero degrowth thrust upon them.
The trouble must instead be that those dumb Physical Class voters are being led astray by problematic narratives, the cure for which is to pinpoint how those problematic narratives are spreading, suppress them, and bombard voters with approved narratives until they learn to properly love Big Brother.
Lest you think the 1984 reference is overstating the case, consider that the Biden administration literally established a Ministry of Truth and lost a major court case over it.
Will No One Rid Us of These Troublesome Facts?
Joe Biden reportedly believes all the polls showing his policies are unpopular are Fake News, and his solution is to try to berate the New York Times into being even more of a DNC-shill outlet than, let’s face it, it already is.
In addition to feeling entitled to preferential media coverage, Biden’s administration established the aforementioned Ministry of Truth, which while short-lived was just the tip of the iceberg; a taste of what was to come in an elitist war on free speech. The Democrats have established and funded a sprawling Censorship Industrial Complex to surveil both social media and private messaging and suppress any flareups of “misinformation” (aka wrongthink) against the ever-shifting Party Line. Matt Taibbi summed up the situation as:
A vast new public-private bureaucracy devoted to stopping “mis-, dis-, and malinformation,” while smoothing public acquiescence to the emergence of a spate of new government agencies with “information warfare” missions.
The “Censorship-Industrial Complex” is just the Military-Industrial Complex reborn for the “hybrid warfare” age.
Much like the war industry, pleased to call itself the “defense” sector, the “anti-disinformation” complex markets itself as merely defensive, designed to fend off the hostile attacks of foreign cyber-adversaries who unlike us have “military limitations.” The CIC, however, is neither wholly about defense, nor even mostly focused on foreign “disinformation.”
It’s become instead a relentless, unified messaging system aimed primarily at domestic populations, who are told that…we must rethink old conceptions about rights, and give ourselves over to new surveillance techniques like “toxicity monitoring”.
There are two main problems with policing “mis-, dis-, and malinformation”. First, much (or even most) of what gets suppressed is factually accurate but simply inconvenient or embarrassing to elites currently holding power (malinformation literally means truthful)
Second, elites themselves still have free reign to play fast and loose with claims like “transitory inflation” and “secure borders” and “mass graves” and “Covid vaccines prevent both infection and transmission” without ever getting called out by their misinformation mercenaries in the “fact checking” sphere. At best, the lies are eventually memory-holed; Nellie Bowles estimates that “two years is usually the amount of time that passes before “fake news” can become “common knowledge”.
As Jacob Siegel put it in Tablet:
In a technical or structural sense, the censorship regime’s aim is not to censor or to oppress, but to rule. That’s why the authorities can never be labeled as guilty of disinformation. Not when they lied about Hunter Biden’s laptops, not when they claimed that the lab leak was a racist conspiracy, not when they said that vaccines stopped transmission of the novel coronavirus. Disinformation, now and for all time, is whatever they say it is. That is not a sign that the concept is being misused or corrupted; it is the precise functioning of a totalitarian system.
The irony of current mainstream political discourse, wherein the architects of this propaganda-cum-censorship regime are claiming it’s their populist opponents who are “bad for democracy” is simply staggering. The Iron Law of Woke Projection never misses.
Global War on Free Speech
As with lawfare, the Censorship Industrial Complex is not solely an American problem. Justin Trudeau’s Hail Mary strategy to avert his seemingly inevitable electoral bloodbath involves making it illegal for anyone to criticize him say hurtful things on the internet. It is hard to overstate how horrifying the upcoming Online Harms Bill truly is; it has been called:
An “Assault on Free Speech”,
“Staggeringly Reckless” by the Globe and Mail,
“Orwellian” by the Spectator (and Margaret Atwood)
An “overbroad violation of expressive freedom, privacy, protest rights, and liberty” by the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, and
A “terrible law that will unduly impose restrictions on Canadians’ sacred Charter right to freedom of expression” by a former Chair of the Human Rights Tribunal.
To consolidate the main concerns throughout the above cited articles, the flaws with the bill include that it would:
Enlist Canada’s citizens in an ambitious social monitoring system, with rewards of up to $20,000 for anonymous “informants” of hateful behavior, with the guilty paying penalties up to $50,000, creating a self-funded national spying system…The standard of proof is “balance of probabilities,” not “beyond reasonable doubt,” as in a criminal trial. There is no defence of truth, as there is in a libel case. The likely chilling effect on speech is obvious, as is the incentive for complaints, frivolous or otherwise.
Introduce extraordinary criminal penalties, including life in prison not just for existing crimes like “advocating genocide,” but for any “offence motivated by hatred,” in theory any non-criminal offense, as tiny as littering, committed with hateful intent;
Punish Minority Report pre-crime, where if an informant convinces a judge you “will commit” a hate offense, you can be jailed up to a year, put under house arrest, have firearms seized, or be forced into drug/alcohol testing, all for things you haven’t done;
Force corporate Internet platforms to remove “harmful content” virtually on demand (within 24 hours in some cases), the hammer being fines of “up to 6% of… gross global revenue.”
Define the hate speech crime as “continuous communication” of hateful speech, i.e. making the failure to take down speech on the Internet that could be removed the crime. One lawyer commented that this will immediately cause a flurry of activity by conservatives desperate to remove “misgendering” language, since a previous law, C-17, mandated use of appropriate pronouns…The Canadian psychologist and author Jordan Peterson says that under C-63, his criminalization would be a certainty. The legislation appears to apply retroactively, meaning you can be hauled up before the human rights tribunal for any material you’ve left online, regardless of its posting date.
The poorly conceived Digital Safety Commission lacks even basic rules of evidence, can conduct secret hearings, and has been granted an astonishing array of powers with limited oversight. This isn’t a fabrication. For example, Section 87 of the bill literally says “the Commission is not bound by any legal or technical rules of evidence.”
The bill’s provisions include sweeping new search powers of electronic data with no warrant requirement, posing significant threats to privacy rights. The bill provides for unacceptable intrusions into individuals’ digital lives.
It endows government appointees with vast authority to interpret the law, make up new rules, enforce them, and then serve as judge, jury and executioner. Granting such sweeping powers to one body undermines the fundamental principle of democratic accountability.
The safeguard in all this is supposed to be a new definition of hate speech – that is, as ‘detestation or vilification’ rather than mere ‘disdain or dislike’…you can be put away for life for a ‘crime’ whose legal existence hangs on the distinction between ‘dislike’ and ‘detest.’
Not to be outdone, Brazil, The EU, Ireland, Australia, Scotland, and many other countries are jumping on the mass censorship bandwagon, with varying degrees of success.
Taking away free speech rights to “save democracy” has become the new playbook of political elites the world over, begging the question of what exactly remains to distinguish open societies from closed societies.
Where Is This Going?
Hands down the best analysis of the world’s current political trajectory is N.S. Lyon’s The China Convergence. If you haven’t read it yet, I cannot recommend it strongly enough; it explores our paradoxical reality where on the one hand,
Differences and tensions between the United States and China have never been greater. The whole world is dividing itself between the blocs of these two opposing superpowers. A new Cold War is dawning, complete with a global ideological “battle between democracy and autocracy.”
But on the other hand,
When it comes to the most fundamental political questions, China and the United States are not diverging but converging to become more alike.
Like lifeforms repeatedly evolving into crabs, The China Convergence lays out how countries around the world are all evolving towards a surprisingly consistent blend of crony capitalism, digital panopticons, and elections that ultimately have little to no impact on who holds power:
“Despite a rhetorical commitment to egalitarianism and ‘democracy,’ the elite class deeply distrusts and fears the people over whom it rules. These elites have concentrated themselves into a separate oligarchic political body focused on prioritizing and preserving their rule and their own overlapping set of shared interests. Wracked by anxiety, they strive constantly to maximize their control over the masses, rationalizing a need to forcefully maintain stability in the face of dangerous threats, foreign and domestic. Everything is treated as an emergency. ‘Safety’ and ‘security’ have become be the watchwords of the state, and of society generally.”
“Complex systems of surveillance, propaganda, and coercion are implemented to help firmly nudge (or shove) the common man into line. Communities and cultural traditions that resist this project are dismantled. Harmfully contrary ideas are systematically censored, lest they lead to dangerous exposure. Governing power has been steadily elevated, centralized, and distributed to a technocratic bureaucracy unconstrained by any accountability to the public.”
“Those more in tune with the tide of history (i.e. elite interests) are held to be morally and intellectually superior, as a class, to backwards reactionary elements. Only certain views are stamped ‘scientific’ and ‘correct,’ although these may change on a political whim.”
“The individual is encouraged to fulfill his assigned role as a docile consumer and cog in the regime’s machine, not that of a self-governing citizen. The state regularly acts to stimulate and manage consumer demand, and to strategically regulate and guide industrial production, and the corporate sector has largely fused itself with the state. Cronyism is rampant.”
“The relentless political messaging and ideological narrative has come to suffuse every sphere of life, and dissent is policed. Culture is largely stagnant. Uprooted, corralled, and hounded, the people are atomized, and social trust is very low. Reality itself often feels obscured and uncertain. Demoralized, some gratefully accept any security offered by the state as a blessing. At the same time, many citizens automatically assume everything the regime says is a lie. Officialdom in general is a Kafkaesque tragi-comedy of the absurd, something only to be stoically endured by normal people. Yet year by year the pressure to conform only continues to be ratcheted higher…
Which country does this describe? If you can’t quite tell, well, that’s the point…China is just already a bit further down the path towards the same future.”
“Back in the year 2000, President Bill Clinton had mocked the Chinese government’s early attempts to censor free speech on the internet, suggesting that doing so would be “like trying to nail Jell-O to the wall”…two decades later, such scorn had been roundly replaced by open admiration.”
“Something had changed in the calculus of America’s elites. Traditionally at least vaguely liberal, their seemingly abrupt U-turn on the value of free speech and deliberative democracy represents…a final replacement of old order classical liberalism with an open embrace of total technocratic managerialism.”
“From this point forward the definition of democracy itself would begin to change: ‘democracy’ no longer meant self-government by the demos – the people – exercised through voting and elections; instead it would come to mean the institutions, processes, and progressive objectives of the managerial civil service itself. In turn, actual democracy became ‘populism.’ Protecting the sanctity of ‘democracy’ now required protecting the managerial state from the demos by making governance less democratic.”
“Across the West, the managerial elite therefore immediately went into a frenzy over the danger allegedly presented by “populism” and launched their own revolt, declaring a Schmittian state of exception in which all the standard rules and norms of democratic politics could be suspended in order to respond to this existential ‘crisis.”
“There is a level of admiration I actually have for China because their basic dictatorship is allowing them to actually turn their economy around on a dime and say we need to go green,” Canada’s Justin Trudeau has for instance explained”
“Facing a crisis of popular legitimacy, managerial elites across the West have, in the name of resisting “fascism,” saving “democracy,” and achieving universal safety and social justice, begun to employ a wave of revolutionary methods to transform their regimes into even vaster Hobbesian monstrosities of compliance and control. No specific plot or conspiracy is necessarily needed to explain this; only the nature of managerialism.”
“Fortunately this project has not yet fully succeeded…nor can it yet openly operate outside the framework of the old democratic order and the lingering moral legitimacy that moldy shroud still provides. The regime must continue to advance mainly through existing mechanisms of legal and civic authority. Hence the upside-down world of our present transitional period, in which the new order constantly and loudly insists its mission is to defend the old order even as it dismantles it.”
For a portend of what this new order looks like in historically open societies, all one needs to do is look across at closed societies. For example, Trump’s political future is starting to look an awful lot like Alexei Navalny’s, and Soviet ex-pat and world chess champion Garry Kasparov said of his work for the Censorship Industrial Complex “If I’m being honest, having a Commission on disinformation…reminds me of home. This type of approach was common practice in the USSR.”
The EU also seems to be reinventing the wheel of Soviet-style governance, except instead of a series of “republics” all centrally governed by Moscow, Europe is becoming a group of nominally-sovereign states all functionally governed by Brussels. The Netherlands was largely forced by the EU into curtailing its national agricultural sector, to which the Dutch citizenry responded with mass street protests and then by electing Geert Wilders. The EU also blackmailed Poland into electing a government favoured by Brussels and is trying similar tactics to bring Hungary to heel. Georgia Meloni now finds herself having to resort to increasingly creative measures in order to fulfil her basic promises to the Italian electorate without getting vetoed by EU apparatchiks. Naturally, the Brexit movement was painted as fascist for insulating the UK from the whims of Brussels mandarins. I personally hope Ukraine is able to join the EU, in no small part because their experiences over the past hundred or so years would make them a very strong (and sorely needed) voice for national sovereignty in the European Bloc.
Russia and China aren’t the only analogues to recent developments in the West either. The Laptop Class in the US has started demanding guaranteed Supreme Court seats and Ivy League presidencies for Black women, and the Biden regime is openly allocating government aid based on race. This racial spoils system is not overly dissimilar from, say, Lebanon, with its allotment of government positions along explicitly sectarian lines.
Worse yet, the Laptop Class is filled with true believers in Ibram X. Kendi’s program of “antiracism”, which if implemented would be a death blow for democratic self-government, as Chris Rufo has reported:
In an essay for Politico Magazine, Boston University professor and bestselling popularizer of critical race theory Ibram Kendi unveiled his proposal for an “anti-racist amendment” to the Constitution. “The amendment would make unconstitutional racial inequity over a certain threshold, as well as racist ideas by public officials,” Kendi explained. “It would establish and permanently fund the Department of Antiracism (DOA) comprised of formally trained experts on racism and no political appointees. The DOA would be responsible for preclearing all local, state, and federal public policies to ensure they won’t yield racial inequity, monitor those policies, investigate private racist policies when racial inequity surfaces, and monitor public officials for expressions of racist ideas. The DOA would be empowered with disciplinary tools to wield over and against policymakers and public officials who do not voluntarily change their racist policy and ideas.”
In other words, the scope and power of the new “Department of Antiracism” would be nearly unlimited. In effect, it would become a fourth branch of government, unaccountable to voters, that would have the authority to veto, nullify, or suspend any law in any jurisdiction in the United States. It would mean an end to the system of federalism and to the lawmaking authority of Congress. Furthermore, under the power to “investigate private racist policies” and wield authority over “racist ideas,” the new agency would have unprecedented control over the work of lawmakers, as well as auxiliary policymaking institutions such as think tanks, research centers, universities, and political parties.
Although Kendi’s proposal is framed as an amendment to the American constitutional order, it is better described as an end to the constitutional order. In the name of racial justice, the critical race theorists and their fellow travelers would limit, curtail, or abolish the rights to property, equal protection, due process, federalism, speech, and the separation of powers. They would also replace the system of checks and balances with an “anti-racist” bureaucracy with nearly unlimited state power—and every other institution would be forced to fall in line.
Andrew Sullivan concurs:
“It’s hard not to notice that there is no room for changing minds and hearts in this worldview. The point is to get and use power. You do not vote racist politicians out of office, or persuade others to do so in a liberal democratic process. You “compel” them or “drive them from office” with “antiracist power”…it really is a revelation to see the goal Kendi sets.
He wants unelected “formally trained experts on racism” (presumably all from critical race-theory departments) to have unaccountable control over every policy…in every field of life, public or private. They are tasked with investigating “private racist policies.” Any policy change anywhere in the U.S. would have to be precleared by these “experts” who could use “disciplinary tools” if policymakers do not cave to their demands. They would monitor and control public and private speech. What Kendi wants is power to coerce others to accept his worldview and to implement his preferred policies, over and above democratic accountability or political opposition. Among those policies would be those explicitly favoring nonwhites over whites because “the only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.”
Kendi’s proposed DOA would have veto power over the legislative, judicial, and executive branches of government (by having “preclearing” rights over “all local, state, and federal public policies”), and would have “disciplinary tools” over elected officials, so if the Experts™ don’t like who won the last election they can just fire the President.
A system like this already exists…in Iran. There, they have elections and a Presidency, but elected officials hold no real power. Instead, supreme executive power rests solely with unelected clerics led by the Grand Ayatollah. Kendi is essentially arguing for an American theocracy, except instead of hardline Shiite mullahs his theocracy would be ruled by racebaiting wokescolds.
Kendi commands $20,000-per-hour speaking fees from supposedly cash-strapped public schools, and was granted a sinecure at Boston University where accountability is presumed to be a dogwhistle for white supremacy. Far from rejecting this totalitarian vision of America, Laptop Class elites have wholeheartedly thrown their weight behind it. Ayatollah Kendi could be a plausible future for the American Experiment if progressives get their way.
North of the 49th, the will of the people is already becoming an afterthought. Supreme Court Justice Malcome Rowe has warned that Canadian judges are taking legislating from the bench to ever greater extremes by recognizing “unwritten constitutional principles”, the most famous of which is probably the recent invention of the right to have taxpayers fund your assisted suicide.
The Fraser Institute has noted that judges across Canada have similarly willed a “duty to consult” into existence for any potential natural resource developments taking place in claimed “traditional territory” (aka the entirety of Canada). Proponents/investors in all resource projects have an “offloaded” requirement to “consult” any First Nations groups claiming to be affected, and First Nations must be “accommodated”, but don’t worry this totally is “not a veto” and there is no “requirement to reach an agreement”.
In practice, this means would-be project developers face a Kafkaesque crapshoot wherein they must first allow any and all First Nations groups that self-identify as possibly affected to present their list(s) of demands. The developers then have a choice between surrendering to those demands or find themselves sued over alleged failings to adequately “consult” and “accommodate”. Expensive and lengthy litigation is thus more or less baked into the project development process, and developers just have to hope whatever judge they eventually draw is not in a virtue-signaling mood.
Thanks to the interventions of activist judges, Canada’s national economy is now largely held hostage by 5% of the population; Power To The People this is not. A suitable comparison abroad might be Myanmar’s junta, just with military uniforms replaced by robes. Canada as a country is increasingly ruled by judicial fiat.
C2C made a similar observation about Rosalie Abella doling out what she calls “constitutional benediction.”
While undoubtedly self-assured in tone, Abella’s use of the word “benediction” – a religious term referring to a pastor delivering God’s blessing upon grateful congregants – presents a disturbing view of how Canada’s most powerful judges see their relationship to the nation’s citizens…The oft–repeated myth that Canadian judges are apolitical is clearly false. When judges strike down laws passed by Parliament and instead impose their personal views onto the country, they make decisions that are profoundly political in nature.
The way the Supreme Court has interpreted the Charter – by disregarding its original intended meaning, inventing new rights, and expanding its power to strike down legislation – has made it the most powerful political institution in Canada today.
Canada’s junta problem is likely to get worse, not better. In addition to the aforementioned “judge, jury and executioner” Digital Safety Commission, Howard Anglin and Ray Pennings have reported on how successful Trudeau has been in stacking the Senate with ostensibly-independent-but-reliably-partisan appointees, more or less guaranteeing a constitutional crisis should any remotely conservative party have the audacity to win an election.
Across the developed world and supposedly “open” societies, rule by the demos is being systematically sidelined in favour of rule by those proclaming to be defending “Democracy Itself!!!!” even as they dismantle it from within.
Populism is Our Last, Best Hope for Liberty
Against the backdrop of this global surge in censorship, criminalization of political opposition, and “We The People” being supplanted by “Trust The Experts™”, the only good news is that populism isn’t going down without a fight. Pierre Poilievre, for example, has vowed to begin using the Notwithstanding Clause at the federal level to give the demos what they want on issues like criminal sentencing, over the objections of the SCC junta.
Poilievre has also vowed to defund the CBC, showing that populists, by virtue of generally being of the unwoke variety, have a much easier time holding entitled bureaucrats accountable for pissing away taxpayer money, a topic I’ve written about previously.
Those elections I mentioned at the top bode well for the normies realizing their rights and way of life are much safer in the hands of populist upstarts than with the old guard of wokified establishment elites. The redpilling of the demos is well underway and only continuing to gain momentum; Trump’s fundraising blitz shows that even the most aggressive lawfare tactics can easily backfire.
We’re by no means out of the woods; what Christopher Lasch called The Revolt of the Elites is clearly growing more brazen and desperate. As elites close ranks to protect their hegemony, populists around the globe will increasingly find themselves forced to cross an untold number of Rubicons to have any hope of returning power to the voters where it belongs.
I won’t pretend to be certain who will win this showdown between the populists and the elites, only that the showdown is coming and it’s probably going to peak at roughly the same time as the developed world runs out of money. Elites may come to regret consolidating absolute political power amongst themselves, as they may well find themselves with nobody left to blame when everything goes tits up fiscally.
Politics for the coming years will be many things, but boring won’t be one of them. More to come as we see how Trump’s sentencing shakes out, and how all those international elections go.
Over here in the UK we have the Very Left Labour who kneel to Saint George and are happy for men to compete in women's sports and unlimited immigration Vs Labour Lite, otherwise known as the Conservatives who Kneel for Saint George, are fighting against The Gender Bull shit and like unlimited Immigration. Not much of a choice really lol.
There is a third option but the MSN here has such a hold that they've convinced people that if they vote for that third option then they're an ist/phobe/bigot.
I'm voting for the third option.
One of the best pieces I've read this year, not just in your break down of the bipolar equation before us, but where we've come as a civilization, at this point in time.
We continually see the same patterns repeat, in new and improved livery, but they're the same.
What's comforting is that in most cases, populism gets the upper hand, even if only for a brief respite. To be sure there are many insults, abuses and woes ahead, but as Steve Bannon alludes to- "people have had a bellyful and are starting to believe their lying eyes - see what you see".
Restacking this work.